Rackspace OnMetal Server : Hands-on Test

Here is full information on Rackspace OnMetal Server along with types and pricing on per hourly basis from our real life experience. When first Rackspace announced, we wrote about OnMetal Dedicated Servers with CoreOS. The old article is quite important for different kind of readers. Rackspace recently has undergone a huge improvement, also there is a smaller increase in pricing with increased quality of services and products. OnMetal Server is not Multi-tenant. This a kind of modernized, pay as you go Dedicated Server as a Service – not really Cloud Server.

Rackspace OnMetal Server : Offered Features

Rackspace currently offering three fully different Hardware Flavor Class with preconfigured hardware specification. Right at this moment, the RAM or CPU can not be custom configured. Also the RSA Key requires to be freshly set despite RSA key is available and set for Cloud Servers – which clearly states their OnMetal datacenter setup has no connection with the existing cloud.

The first class is named OnMetal I/O. As per Rackspace, the servers are designed to support low-latency and extreme throughput to local storage, using a pair of the fastest PCIe flash cards. The specification is as follows :

CPU : Dual 2.8 Ghz, 10 core Intel® Xeon® E5-2680 v2
RAM : 128 GB
System Disk : 32 GB
Data Disk : Dual 1.6 TB PCIe flash cards
Network : Redundant 10 Gb / s connections in a high availability bond
Pricing : $2.4658 / hr plus cost of Bandwidth

The second one is named OnMetal Memory, these servers are designed for memory-intensive workloads such as for serving Memcached or Redis cache. Low-latency 10 Gb / s network enable modern architectures with the entire working set in RAM. The hardware specification is :

CPU : Dual 2.6 Ghz, 6 core Intel® Xeon® E5-2630 v2
RAM : 512 GB
System Disk : 32 GB
Network : Redundant 10 Gb / s connections in a high availability bond
Pricing : $2.2603 / hr plus cost of Bandwidth

The third flavor is Optimized for Web Servers. These servers are designed for connection handling and CPU-heavy workloads such as web serving. A low latency 10 Gb / s network, OnMetal Compute is perfect for rendering web pages or pushing packets. The hardware specification is :

CPU : 2.8 Ghz, 10 core Intel® Xeon® E5-2680 v2
RAM : 32 GB
System Disk : 32 GB
Network : Redundant 10 Gb / s connections in a high availability bond
Price : $0.7534 / hr plus cost of Bandwidth

The last one is least costly, taking 720 hours a month, the cost can be easily calculated. To compare, 30 GB cloud server costs $1.36 / hr plus cost of Bandwidth.

Rackspace OnMetal Server : The Rackspace Style Shine is OS

We expected only CoreOS, hardly Ubuntu. But Rackspace offered three versions of Debian and CoreOS. Debian, obviously will be the choice for the most on real life as experience with CoreOS is lesser.
In future we will definitely provide OnMetal specific video tutorials, the performance from our experience, is the best with OnMetal I/O as Application server.